Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage v1.01 is the first objective hardware performance
benchmark for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows
Vista. PCMark Vantage is perfectly suited for benchmarking any type of
Microsoft Windows Vista PC from multimedia home entertainment systems
and laptops to dedicated workstations and hi-end gaming rigs. Regardless
of whether the benchmarker is an artist or an IT Professional, PCMark
Vantage shows the user where their system soars or falls flat, and how
to get the most performance possible out of their hardware. The PCMark
Vantage benchmark was run in 64-bit mode for the results shown below.

Segate Momentus 7200.4 500GB:

Segate Momentus XT 500GB:

Benchmark Results: We were told by Seagate that the Momentus XT hybrid drive would do well in PCMark Vantage and SYSmark 07 and boy were they right. On our first run of PCMark Vantage the drive scored 4074 in the HDD test suite. We then ran the drive four more times and the scores came in like this – 6909, 7236, 7298 and then peaked at 7415 on the fifth and final run on PCMark Vantage. The Seagate algorithm learned that we were often using the application and put it in the NAND Flash for improved performance. The scores above are from the fifth run where we scored 7415 in the HDD test suite.

Comparison Chart Results: The Seagate Momentus XT more than doubles the performance of the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 hard drive here thanks to the NAND Flash memory that it uses. You can see that it comes really close to the overall performance level of the Western Digital VelociRaptor! The WD VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX 600GB hard drive retails for $279.99 and the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB for just $156. You can see that the Seagate Momentus XT won’t compete with SSDs when it comes to speed, but it does perform very well against traditional platter drives when it comes to things like OS and application loading as the drive can store that data on the 4GB SLC NAND chip.